growth

Triggit, the so-called “demand-side platform” that buys ads in real-time bidding exchanges for about 200 clients, won $7.4 million in series B funding from Spark Capital and Foundry Group, the company said.

The new investment came after explosive growth in the business Triggit is placing inside FBX, Facebook’s RTB ad exchange.

FBX works by allowing outside advertisers to drop tracking “cookies” on users’ web browsers. When those users sign into Facebook, the cookies triggers ads promoting those advertisers. Triggit’s clients include Hilton, Kmart and Lowes.

Spark Capital founder Santo Politi said Triggit is “on track to become very profitable.”

CEO Zach Coelius told us his company handled about 200 clients internationally, all of which spend upwards of about $10,000 a month on RTB ads. The company has grown from about a dozen staff at the beginning of the year to 32 employees today.

Triggit place ads in all the major RTB exchanges, but FBX is driving the growth, Coelius says: “We’ve seen 300 percent topline revenue growth[from Facebook ads] since FBX launched in June.”

Morgan Stanley’s US Equity Strategy team led by Adam Parker just published their 2013 outlook for the stock market. They’re calling for the S&P 500 to end next year at 1,434.

The massive research note included a lot of interesting information about the stock market including this: just 10 companies are accounting for 88 percent of all of the earnings growth in the S&P 500 this year.

For 2013, the sources of growth are expected to be much more diversified with the top 10 names driving just 34 percent of growth.

Still, the biggest names will play a big role next year. “Notably, Apple, Bank of America, Microsoft, GE, and Google are forecasted to be one-quarter of the entire S&P500’s earnings growth in 2013,” writes Parker.

LinkedIn is really targeting enterprises. Weiner wants to grow revenue by getting more customers, instead of raising prices for existing customers, at least for his flagship Recruiter product, he said.

That’s a more than reasonable idea, given that LinkedIn gave itself a pretty good price hike over a year ago.

But the company is also expanding its breath in every other way possible, so it can roll out new products to the enterprise too (plus other new users, like students).

LinkedIn is trying to grab the lion’s share of a $27 billion market for recruiting tools. Here’s how Weiner said it is doing so far:

Its flagship product, Recruiter, sells for $8,000/year per seat (per recruiter using it). That price was raised from rom $6,000 per seat and he’s not thinking of raising it again anytime soon (though he left the door open).

LinkedIn currently has 12,000 enterprise customers.

Over 2 million companies have posted company profiles on LinkedIn. Profiles are LinkedIn mini-sites that allow users to follow companies. (For example, here is Business Insider’s profile page.) Today LinkedIn announced changes that should make it easier for companies to use this feature.

Some companies, like Citi and IBM, have over half a million followers of their company profiles on LinkedIn. (These might be employees, competitors, job seekers, or anyone else interested in the company.)

Its biggest enterprise customers, Weiner says, “are spending on the order of millions of dollars” a year with LinkedIn. On the other end, small companies might spend $25 a month.

LinkedIn now has 175 million members, worldwide and is seeing two new signups every second. There are over 600 million white-collar workers worldwide, so it still has a way to grow.

LinkedIn has more than 1 million groups, ranging in size from two people to more than a quarter of a million.

Over 75,000 developers are building applications for LinkedIn through its application programming interface (API), and they came on board within the last year.

It now has sales offices in 25 cities around the world, in countries like Singapore, its Asia-Pacific hub; Brazil; and India. It has multiple offices in Europe, its biggest region beyond the U.S.

It is running on 17 languages and will add more.

Mobile is growing fast in terms of engagement, though not so much in direct revenues. Last year 10% of unique visitors came to the site from its mobile apps. This year its 23%. (Last LinkedIn rolled out a new iPhone app, too). But because LinkedIn makes money primarily from subscriptions, it doesn’t really matter how users access the service.

Although 62% of its membership is international and growing faster than the U.S. yet, only about a third of the company’s revenue is coming from international sources. Ultimately he wants to see those numbers match better.

The biggest opportunity for growth, he says, is to get people more engaged in the site on a daily basis.

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“Peop le view the site more as a digital Rolodex or way to get a job,” Weiner says. “But its not just a way to find your dream job, but a way to be better at the job you are already in.”

WPP Group, the world’s largest ad agency holding company, reported its Q2 2012 results and the revenue breakdown shows a complete reversal of fortunes for North America: When previously growth was strong in the U.S. and Canada, now it is contracting; and where growth in Europe was anemic, now it is robust.

Here’s WPP’s chart:

The key metric is “LFL,” or like-for-like” revenues. Note that North America declined 0.6% in Q2 while Europe grew between 0.8% – 3.5%.

The U.S. ad economy is now doing worse than Belgium, Italy and Japan:

As usual, ad agency revenue growth has continued its strong correlation with U.S. GDP as a whole. As the U.S. economic growth slowed, ad revenues matched the retraction, step for step:

Ad agency revenues hinted at the retraction back in Q1, also. Ad agency revenues are—arguably—a good proxy for economic growth as a whole because they come from a wide variety of consumer-facing companies who often adjust their spending as a percentage of total sales.

PC shipments are stagnant. According to Gartner, worldwide PC shipments in Q2 were basically flat, declining -0.1 percent from last year. PC shipments have grown only 5 percent since the second quarter of 2010, when the iPad was introduced.

Reasons for the bad numbers:

The global economy remains weak.

The upgrade cycle for business PCs has lengthened.

The iPad killed the netbook market, which had been driving growth for the past few years.

Some Windows loyalists are probably waiting for Windows 8 and the new hardware form factors that will ship with it, such as Microsoft’s Surface, a touch screen tablet that doubles as a small laptop.

Microsoft and its PC partners have high hopes for Windows 8, which will start shipping on new PCs in October. But for now, the PC market sure doesn’t look good.

In a statement, Procter said “the revisions to the Company’s fourth quarter outlook are primarily driven by slower than anticipated top-line growth from slower than expected market growth rates and market share softness in developed regions and negative impacts from foreign exchange rate changes.”

Translation: high unemployment coupled with slow-to-no GDP growth in developed markets are destroying the top line.

Android makes up the majority of the smartphone market right now, but that might start to change if recent sales growth trends continue.

The number of new users who purchased an Android smartphone steadily declined throughout the first four months of this year, according to an analysis of recent comScore data by Asymco’s Horace Dediu. In fact, Android net user growth in April hit its lowest point for any month since 2009.

By comparison, the iPhone’s monthly user growth rate has remained about as strong as ever.

Dediu suggests that it may be “too early” to say that Android is on a permanent decline, but these new numbers should definitely make Google sweat a bit.

“The concern has to be that rather than seeing the net adds growing–as they have for two years with only two contiguous months of decline–Android net adds have been falling for four months,” he writes.

Here’s Asymco’s chart showing the month-over-month changes in net user gains for each of the major platforms:

It used to be that big time executives at companies like Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook could explain away ad revenues that weren’t big enough or growing fast enough by pointing out that so far, online ad spending has not been proportional to the amount of time consumers were spending online, and that this was bound to change, and when it did, boom times were ahead.

The argument was: New York ad buyers are way behind the times, and they just don’t get it yet.

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Google released solid financial results last week, meeting expectations on revenue and beating street consensus on the bottom line. However, tucked away in the earnings call was a troubling statistic: cost-per-click growth slumped 12 percent year-over-year. This follows an 8 percent drop in CPC in the prior quarter.

The drop is probably the result of a surge in mobile search queries with the growth of smartphones and tablets. While Google reportedly has an ~90 percent share of the mobile search market, mobile CPC is much lower. Conventional wisdom holds that they will eventually catch up, but we argue in a new note that this is not necessarily the case.

This is because Google’s revenue is determined by advertisers’ ROI, not the number of clicks on search ads. In other words, unless consumers start purchasing more goods because of their mobile devices, CPCs won’t rise.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.